www.virtualacorn.co.uk/forum

To Aaron - what are the chances?
To the rest of us - how big a market is there likely to be?
Maybe one answer will influence the other?!
Andy

As far as I am aware this is a Linux machine - it also has quite a slow processor - although it's cheap I am not convinced rhat it would make a good target machine at this point.

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The specification on the Asus website says that it is Windows XP compatible ...
... but I did see any mention of the (Intel) processor speed.

Although the machine is XP compatible it ships with a version of Linux. so a copy of Windows would need to be added to the cost. That puts the price up to nearly ??300 - for a machine with a 900Mhz Celeron and an 800 x 480 screen display.
You can buy a "real" laptop for that money...

FWIW, RComp do a "RISCBook Mini", which is an eeePC with XP and VRPC, and I have one. Yes, it's expensive, but IMHO useful in a way that a "real" laptop isn't. If it had been around 3 years ago, I would have had doubts about buying the "real" laptop on which I'm typing this.

Peter.

Following on from this I have now purchased an Asus Eee 701SD with a copy of WindowsXP. I now withdraw my earlier comments. Firstly when run in "Super performance" mode with the CPU clocked to 900Mhz VRPC givces StrongArm+ performance levels. Plus the Intel GMA900 cheipset supports proper anti-aliasing, so you can run resolutions bigger than 800 x 480 with the entire desktop anti-aliased. So even 1200 x 720 is very usable on the screen. Battery life also seems very good.

So my earlier comments were completely wrong, the Eee 701 is a very nice little machine, which does (suprisingly) have enough grunt to run some reasonably intensive tasks very well. The only issue is the paltry 512Mb of RAM, I will be updating this to 2Mb asap.

Does anyone have experience of using any later versions please? The 900a perchance?

AFAICT the specs have been upped in various areas but the prices haven't. Is this at the expense of anything, e.g. the battery life?

All help gratefully received, TIA

Mike Nicholl
pp T.O.M.S.

We have a number of customers using various "Netbooks". Ranging from Asus Eee, Samsung NC10, MSi Wind etc. As far as I am aware they all run very well.

Good news for me. I posted today on the AdjustSA forum asking whether the eeepc 1002H (and similar) graphics card works ok. I'd still like to know how well VA works on the Eeepc/XP notebooks. They generally have the Atom N280 nowadays, and 1GB is fitted as standard (2GB max).

TOMS, did you get your eeepc 900/901 perchance?

How does the speed compare with the Iyonix? That's what I'll be comparing it to.

I don't have any speed comparisons for your particular model. The Atom chips are designed for long battery life, not performance. In CPU terms they seem to be similar (clock for clock) to some of the late Celeron chips (but battery life is a lot longer). As such I doubt VRPC would be as quick as the Iyonix (although for some disc based tasks VRPC may well be a bit quicker). I expect you get faster than a StrongARM most of the time.

[quote]quattrocci wrote:
TOMS, did you get your eeepc 900/901 perchance?[/quote]

Not yet. As we've both now asked in the Forum, we were rather hoping that someone would come back with personal experiences of the more recent iterations of the current range of netbooks, not just the Asus 900/900a/901.

On paper, the general specifications have improved quite significantly in, say, the last 6-9 months (i.e. not just the processor). So it would be nice to receive up-to-date views. Is there anyone out there who can help please?

Mike Nicholl
pp T.O.M.S.

Just got the 1002HA and can report that it FEELS like it's faster than my Iyonix!

Very pleased, I am.

Brian

Thanks for that useful info on the 1002HA Brian, much appreciated. Definitely on the wish-list.

Mike Nicholl
pp T.O.M.S.